Conserving Arowanas Need More Than Releasing Fish

Chapter 1: Arowanas everywhere but home

ONE MORNING in early January, Mohamad Zuhri Hakim bin Zaili packed his angling rods and drove 20 minutes towards Lake Bukit Merah in Perak. From above, the man-made lake looks like a lady in a dress, her long unbridled hair blowing in the wind. A train track runs across the lake from east to west.
Hakim has been fishing at the lake for 5 years. The 34-year-old with a black scraggly beard is particularly fond of a spot he found 2 years ago at the western bank, just north of the train track. Clusters of a woody pandan with thorny stems called rasau (Pandanus helicopus) grow along the bank, and their submerged roots attract many fish. Hakim has caught common species like lampam there, but also the lake’s much rarer and most famous resident: the Asian arowana.

The Asian arowana (Scleropages formosus) is a sleek and shiny freshwater fish that has fascinated fish hobbyists for decades. Adults could grow longer than a metre, but even a 15cm juvenile could sell for more than RM1,000. Pet owners want more arowanas, and breeders strive to meet their demand.

Arowana farms line a canal that flows west out of Lake Bukit Merah. In each farm are tens to hundreds of rectangle dug-out ponds where workers raise thousands of arowanas. The fish come in various colours: golden, metallic blue, red, albino. Workers grade, pack, and ship the fish live to aquariums across Malaysia and overseas. Hakim worked at one of the farms too.

In the wild, however, the Asian arowana is endangered and rarely seen. Lake Bukit Merah, 3,600 ha in size, was once a haven of the much sought-after golden Asian arowana. Yet nobody has caught a wild arowana there for nearly 20 years. Zealous collectors for the aquarium trade from the 1960s to 1980s have largely emptied the lake and surrounding rivers of wild arowanas. Wild populations elsewhere suffered the same fate too.

But efforts are underway to make a happy conservation story out of the Asian arowana.

In 2018 and 2022, Bukit Merah arowana breeders and the government released about 300 adult arowanas into the lake as a conservation measure. Since then, arowanas have been spotted around the release sites. Hakim himself has caught 8 adults.

The government plans to release more captive-bred arowanas. On 9 January, fisheries officers held a two-hour dialogue with Bukit Merah fishermen and arowana farmers. The officers asked the locals to support future releases. If the fish is no longer threatened in the wild, it would help to open access to the market in the United States that prohibits the import of endangered species. Participants asked about the results of the earlier releases in 2018 and 2022 and the lack of protection for arowana in the lake. Nobody gave a straight answer.

However, arowana conservation would need more than releases of farm-bred fish. To thrive, wild arowanas need safe and food-rich environments to feed and breed. But from where Hakim cast his line and bait, Lake Bukit Merah does not appear to be such a place.

The first time he stumbled upon this fishing spot, he had to slog through a forest. Now he drives there on an unpaved road built for a new durian plantation. The forest was cleared and the bank left barren except for scattered clumps of rasau and trees. Hakim sits between two rasau clumps and casts his line into the brownish-green lake.

He is catching far less fish than before. “The water is so turbid,” he says. He blames the soil run-off from forest loss. He points to the newly cleared hill behind him, its yellow clay soil exposed on steep slopes. “The soil would surely wash into the water. It’s someone’s land; what can we do?”

When the water is clearer, one might be lucky enough to see arowanas swimming among the rasau, he says. Local fishermen and anglers say they release any arowana they catch. But the locals claim that “anglers from outside” had accidentally killed arowanas when they tried to keep or sell them.

Hakim and many locals see Asian arowanas, especially the golden variety, as an icon and heritage of Bukit Merah. They would like the lake to once again be a haven for Asian arowanas.

What can we do to re-establish a thriving wild arowana population in Bukit Merah? To get the answer, Macaranga spoke with nearly 30 arowana farmers and traders, fishermen, scientists, and government officers. Arowana conservation is not simple, but it is feasible. What is needed most is a fraction of the doggedness that drove us to kidnap Asian arowanas from their homes into our own to satisfy our viewing desire.

Chapter 2: Wild times

About a century before Hakim came to Bukit Merah, British anthropologist Ivor Hugh Norman Evans visited the lake in 1922. The Bukit Merah reservoir, as it was called, was built 16 years before by British engineers to irrigate the vast expanse of paddy fields to the west. By the lake, Evans snapped a photograph of fish strung on three lines, all caught with angling rods. Among the 68 fish were 6 Asian arowanas.

Appearing in the 1923 Illustrated Guide to the Federated Malay States, Evans’ photo is the first published evidence of Asian arowana in the peninsula. It also captured a scene that was never to be witnessed again: a time when arowanas were so common in Bukit Merah that they made up nearly 10% of fish catch. That was a time when elephants still roamed the coasts of Perak, and travel guides ran 30 pages of instructions on hunting the seladang, rhinoceros, and tigers in Malaya.

The Asian arowana is a freshwater fish. It lives in lakes, rivers, and swamps from Cambodia to Peninsular Malaysia, Sumatra, Sarawak, and Kalimantan. A top predator, the fish embodies speed and strength. It scans the depths and above with enormous eyes and a pair of bristles (called barbels) on the tip of its tapered mouth. Armed with hard scales with highlighted rims and a powerful trio of fins at the end of a long straight back, adult arowanas have little to fear. When provoked, it leaps out of the water.

Asian arowanas vary in colour and genetic makeup across their range, though all belong to the same species. (Note: Scientists identified a new species in 2012 called Scleropages inscriptus found only in southern Myanmar. Asian arowana in this story refers to Scleropages formosus only.) The most prized varieties are the red arowanas in Kalimantan and the golden arowanas in Bukit Merah and nearby waterways. In Kedah and the East Coast of the peninsula, arowanas are of a green hue.

Unlike most fishes, the Asian arowana is a slow breeder. It starts to mate around 3 years old, and females lay 20—50 eggs at a time, each with an orange yolk as large as a marble. As the eggs sink to the bottom, the father scoops them into his mouth and nurses them there. During this time, he fasts and after 60 days, releases his 5cm long fry into the world.

Despite its slow reproduction, the Asian arowana flourishes in healthy environments. In the 1940s, villagers around Lake Bukit Merah were hauling up dozens of arowanas from the river for food at one go, recalled villager Syed Alwi, who was describing his childhood in a July 2002 letter to The Star. Likewise, a Bukit Merah fisherman told Macaranga that, in the 1950s, his father and uncle trapped 8 kg of arowana in a morning and sold them for 15 sen per kati (600 grams).

While Malayan villagers ate Asian arowanas, British officers loved fishing them. One such officer was Anthony Locke, who shared his adventures in the Journal of Malayan Angling Association. In 1954, he had fished for kelah, sebarau, and tengas in Sungai Terengganu (‘Sungai Trengan’) – all well-known feisty fish. But when an arowana bit his hook, it turned out to be the “finest fighter to be found in our rivers”.

The fish leaped 6 feet (1.82 m) out of the water, then dashed 45 m across the river, rocketed up a steep bank, arched its body, and spat out Locke’s line. Locke was awed. He called the arowanas “well educated” for their uncanny ability to dislodge a fishing line. To tackle an arowana, he wrote, “is certainly good for the fisherman who becomes a little too sure of himself.”

But good times in freshwater habitats were fading. In 1957, as Malaya won its independence, the parting president of the Malayan Angling Association warned his members of “insidious” damage to the rivers and fish within. In his farewell letter, HJ Kitchener flagged the dangers of pollution, overfishing, and the eventual loss of native fish. He implored “members and citizens to do all that is possible for the maintenance of clear clean rivers and other areas of freshwater.”

Kitchener was sadly prophetic. A decade later, the era of wild Asian arowanas would give way to the era of pet Asian arowanas.

Chapter 3: Into tanks

People recall differently how arowana shot to popularity in the pet trade. According to Ng Hang Yong, one of Malaysia’s earliest arowana breeders, a Malayan Chinese fish collector called Lim Yi Soon (transliteration) began delivering Asian arowanas to Hong Kong via Singapore in the 1940s. This collector harvested juvenile fish from forest streams and carried them in pails on foot and bicycle to buyers. He would stop often at streams to pour fresh, cool water into the pails to keep the fish alive.

But veteran pet store businessman Chew Seng Lye (also known as Chew Thean Yeang) claims he was the first to introduce Asian arowana to Singapore, a trade hub for ornamental fish in Southeast Asia. He is now a spritely 84-year-old with a full crop of white hair and many stories to share.

When Chew was 23, he started his pet fish business in 1963 in Penang. He commissioned Malay locals in Bukit Merah to collect fish from streams and lakes there. In 1967, one of his collectors brought him a dead adult fish* (see note at the end). Chew had never seen anything like it and was intrigued by the fish’s pair of barbels and big scales tinged with gold. “Get me small ones, alive,” Chew told his collector.

Chew sent a batch of the fish to his clients in Singapore, but nobody recognised it. Eventually, they found the name ‘arowana’ in a book. “But it had no Chinese name, so I looked at its barbels and scales and decided to call it ‘dragon fish’ (龙鱼),” says Chew.

His choice of name for the arowana made it popular. Demand from ornamental fish hobbyists grew, riding on the reverence in Southeast and East Asian cultures for the mythical dragon. Owners believed that arowanas brought them good fortune. Soon, Chew was sending more than a hundred arowanas to Singapore every month. Many others joined the hunt for wild arowanas in the Malaysian forests, says Chew.

Chew sold his first arowana juveniles at RM7 each in 1967. Four years later, the price had shot to RM500 (a lunch in Kuala Lumpur cost only 50 sen at the time).

A mere decade after Chew had sold his first Bukit Merah arowana to Singapore, Lake Bukit Merah and its rivers had lost most of their arowanas. Eventually, traders turned to Indonesia and found arowanas in Sumatra and Kalimantan. When asked if he had thought his collecting would endanger the fish, Chew says: “When everyone starts collecting, of course, it would become less and less.”

Haven no more

Johar bin Bakar recalled the time he began fishing at Bukit Merah in the early 1970s. Tanned and wiry, the 64-year-old is one of the few active fishermen in Kampung Selamat on the southern bank of Lake Bukit Merah.

There were few arowanas left in the lake then, says Johar. Still, “outsiders” would seek them. They would descend on the lake and streams at night, shining their torches into the water. When arowanas swim close to the surface, their eyes reflect red in the torchlight. If collectors failed on their first try, “they would return the next night with a net and encircle the arowanas,” he says. “They had to get them all.”

By the late 1970s, Asian arowanas contributed only 0.02% of total catch weight at Bukit Merah, according to a 1982 PhD dissertation by Yap Siaw-Yang. Yap, then a fisheries researcher at Universiti Malaya, checked fishermen’s catches between 1978 and 1981.

The situation was grave but not hopeless. An aquatic ecologist told Macaranga that if harvesting had been reined in, Asian arowana numbers could have rebounded. That is because Bukit Merah was still a relatively rich and safe environment for Asian arowanas in the 1970s and 1980s.

Yap recorded thriving fish numbers supported by healthy forests upstream. And when a teenage Johar went fishing for haruan but forgot to bring his drink, the lake water was so clean he could lean over the side of his sampan to quench his thirst.

CITES regulates international trade

Because many of the harvested Asian arowanas were sold overseas, regulators sought to restrict international trade. In 1975, the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) was established. It serves to protect species from the pressures of international demand. Species listed in Appendix I, which included the Asian arowana, were prohibited from commercial global trade, while those in Appendix II could be traded only with permits. Malaysia ratified CITES in 1978.

But CITES failed to stop the hunt for wild arowanas. In 1986, arowana trader Raymond Teng told The Star that he paid Orang Asli collectors for the fish – they were still bagging 50 big fish and up to 300 small ones from remote rivers. The price of the fish had rocketed. Teng said a “large and perfect specimen” could sell for RM10,000 – equivalent to RM25,000 today. Thieves broke into houses and pet stores to steal arowanas, while collectors trekked deeper into the forests. Traders saw the impending collapse of the wild arowana supply.

Today, it might seem puzzling that in the first two decades of arowana trade, nobody bred and farmed them. British fisheries officers in Singapore did try in 1927 but failed. By the 1970s, many other fish species were reared in tanks or ponds for food and the pet trade. Why not the arowana?

“We had no idea how they mated or laid eggs,” says arowana breeder Ng Hang Yong. They could not even tell male and female arowanas apart. The 63-year-old owner of Sianlon Aquatic Sdn Bhd in Batu Pahat, Johor, was one of the first to tackle the fish’s secret love life.

Ng eventually decoded the Asian arowana’s secret. His success allowed scores of breeders to have thousands of arowanas romancing in ponds. But that was not the future Ng had wanted.

Chapter 4: Into farms

In the mid-1980s, Ng was left with 30 adult arowanas when a big Taiwanese client suspended his orders. Each fish was longer than 30cm. He panicked. The fish fought in the crowded aquariums, losing scales and value by the day. Ng got tired caring for them. In frustration, he dumped them into a pond in his farm. “I couldn’t care less,” he recalls.

But a few years later, his Taiwanese client returned. When an exhilarated Ng ran a net through his pond, he found 21 surviving adult arowanas and – to his surprise – 11 juvenile arowanas! “I realised the adults must have given birth to these small ones,” says Ng. “Those were parents, I would definitely not sell them, no way!”

A lucrative future in sight, Ng began to buy adult arowanas in earnest. His parent stock grew to 700 adults. He spent the next few years studying his arowanas to maximise their reproduction.

Observing Asian arowanas is a nocturnal activity, as the fish swims near the surface only in the wee hours when the air is cool and damp. Ng pointed his flashlight at the ponds to pick out the red-reflecting arowana eyes. He climbed trees to watch them from above.

He found that sometimes, a pair of arowanas would huddle and move in tandem. They must be courting, he thought. Great, now what about the eggs?

Then he finally saw them. An arowana had breached the surface and opened its mouth. Ng saw the reflection of dozens of red eyes in the mouth. Could it be that arowanas carry their fry in their mouths? Ng confirmed his suspicious when he wrangled adult fish: one leaped at him and spat a mouthful of fry onto his face. It also gave him an idea.

“We could retrieve the fry from the mouth. We could be their nanny,” says Ng, as thrilled recounting this story in 2024 as back then. “Then the adults could start to brood again quickly and produce more young fish for me. I was so happy!”

Ng and his brother developed a routine of prying every fish’s mouth to collect fry a few weeks after they mated. They would then rear the fry with care and grow each to a 10cm fingerling in 2 months.

It was tiring but rewarding. “This fish brought me good luck and money, so I gladly give up my sleep to watch them with my flashlight.”

Ng kept his methods a secret. He even denied breeding arowanas when asked by Fisheries officers. But one day, a Japanese client visited his farm with a photographer. Unknown to Ng, photographs of his operations were later published in a magazine. “Anyone who’s smart could look at the photos and figure it out.” The secret went public in the 1990s.

At the same time, over in Singapore, another company called Rainbow Aquarium had been working for years with the Singaporean government to breed arowanas. In 1993, they succeeded with multiple generations of arowanas.

But while the future seemed bright for arowana farming, it was getting bleaker for wild ones. Almost two decades after CITES prohibited the commercial global trade of wild Asian arowanas, their populations continued to shrink. The ban alone was inadequate. CITES has, however, more than one way to dull the appeal of harvesting wild arowanas.

CITES allows for commercial trade of Appendix I species such as Asian arowana, but only if the individuals were bred and raised in captivity and met other specific conditions. This mechanism aims to flood the market with farm arowanas, crash the price, and cut the rewards of catching wild arowanas. Breeding facilities must acquire CITES permit and tag every exported captive-bred arowana with a microchip and unique serial number. It was a hopeful experiment.

Rainbow Aquarium reportedly became the first CITES registered facility for Asian arowana in 1994. By year-end, they had exported 300 arowanas to Japan for $1.47 million (about RM2.6 million at the time). Close on their heels, Ng’s Sianlon Aquatic also acquired CITES registration and exported to Japan from 1995.

A decade into the new millennium, arowana breeding and trading prospered. Even Hakim the angler sold arowanas at Bukit Merah when he was 18 and used the profits to pay for his wedding. Arowana demand reached record highs year after year, and farms sprouted. While the business would later stutter, Asian arowanas continued to proliferate in ponds like never before.

Meanwhile, wild arowanas faded from public attention. Virtually nobody championed their protection. But in ways that Ng had not foreseen, his breeding methods paved the way for the future conservation of wild arowana.

Conserving Arowanas Needs More Than Releasing Fish, Part 2

The Malaysian government and arowana breeders have been releasing captive-bred arowanas into Lake Bukit Merah to boost wild numbers. But the fish now faces multiple threats, not just overfishing. Could we write a happy ending for the Asian arowana story?

Chapter 5: Burnt

MALAYSIA is the top exporter of Asian arowanas (Scleropages formosus), also known as dragon fish. This freshwater fish is one of the most expensive pet fish globally. It has been endangered in the wild for 50 years, according to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), a wildlife trade treaty, but hundreds of thousands of them are raised in farms every year and sold worldwide.

Breeders, traders, and owners gush about the fullness of the fish’s fins and the shine of its scales. But when asked about the conservation of wild arowanas, they look confused. Ask Bey Thuan Wei, they would say.

Fortunately, Bey, a 43-year-old arowana breeder, was happy to talk and gave full access to his breeding facility in Bukit Merah. Wearing a pair of black-rimmed spectacles and knee-length shorts, Bey leaned on the rail of his balcony. He looked out at the lattice of rectangular dug-out ponds before him. His company owns 180 of such ponds, each with about 25 arowanas in its murky water. Somewhere in his facility is an albino golden arowana he claimed to have bought for RM1 million.

Behind Bey, photos of smiling clients and prize-winning arowanas adorn a wall. It has been 25 years since Bey left his restaurant business to trade ornamental fish and got hooked on breeding arowana.
“The thing about people who love to rear fish,” says Bey “is that while trading is just a business transaction [for us], it’s a wholly different achievement to raise the fish from eggs to adults.”

Bey dug his first arowana pond in 1999, when the arowana market was “just about to heat up”, he recalls. That year, a golden arowana with sparkling, silvery scales due to a rare mutation was sold for RM575,000 (inflation-adjusted RM955,000 now) in Tokyo. The next 2 years saw ornamental fish companies getting listed in the stock exchanges of Malaysia and Singapore. Bey saw a bright, lucrative future.

To export captive-bred Asian arowanas, one would need a CITES permit. To ease operations, Bey bought his parent stock of arowanas from CITES-registered facilities in Johor and Singapore. His stock reproduced and multiplied. In 2008, he set up the Golden Arowana Breeding Farm company and acquired CITES registration 4 years later.

Bey was but one of scores of arowana breeders who charged into the industry in the 2000s. The farming centre is in Bukit Merah, where wild arowanas once abounded. There, arowana farms replaced paddy fields along a 3km stretch of a canal west of the lake. By 2011, there were 70 arowana farms in Bukit Merah, up from fewer than 10 before 2000.

Malaysia was not alone. Arowana marked for commercial trade and exported from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore skyrocketed from 1,100 in 1993 to nearly 90,000 in 2010. Japan had been the biggest import market since 1993, but China was catching up fast.

Then the arowana business crashed. Arowana export prices peaked in 2011, breeders recall. The rapid and simultaneous expansion of arowana farms dumped a glut of Asian arowana into the market. Prices plummeted. But the arowanas in the ponds continued to mate, and breeders kept selling more fish, pushing prices down even more.

Today arowana breeding has become “a very tough” business, says Bey. Other breeders explain that thinning profit margins mean a misstep in cost-control could force a farm to sell its arowanas at a loss.
Traders are also struggling, says Alan Chan Yok Loong, 41. He blames the influx of online sellers. From his store in Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Chan has been selling arowanas in Malaysia since 2012; he does not export.

In 2012, he would pay RM1,000 to buy a golden arowana from farms. Now he can get one for RM400. And for an imported red arowana, he can pay RM900 now instead of RM1,200 a decade ago. Whilst the lower prices are drawing more customers, Chan remains pessimistic.

His brick-and-mortar store is facing off against a slew of online sellers who are happy to earn RM50 a fish or are selling to cut losses. He also worries that most arowana farms would fold under pressure. “The price will only continue to drop,” he says. “We don’t see a future.”

Chan’s grim prediction is shared by other traders and arowana breeders. The eight breeders Macaranga spoke to in Bukit Merah expect many more farms to shut down in 3 years. Already, 3 of the 9 of farms Macaranga contacted have shut down or sold their operations.

Singapore's arowanas go from ponds to reservoirs

But Bey is an astute businessman who spots the opportunities in crises. Low fish prices make it easier to persuade breeders to release captive fish to boost wild populations. It is a short-term loss in return for a much bigger catch: the US ornamental fish industry worth RM7.3 billion.

Since 1976, the US has prohibited imports of Asian arowanas through its Endangered Species Act. If local Asian arowanas are no longer threatened, exporters hope they could persuade US regulators to drop the ban.

Bey got to work. He was going to orchestrate the biggest release of captive-bred arowanas in Malaysia.

Chapter 6: Release

31 October, 2018. The day of the release had finally arrived. Bey and his colleagues had worked with the Department of Fisheries for a year on the arowana release. It was a historic day for the community and Lake Bukit Merah itself. That afternoon, the lake would receive a new cohort of 244 Asian arowanas. The fish were contributed by more than 40 farms in Bukit Merah, all members of the Malaysian Arowana Friendship Club of breeders.

The breeders lifted the arowanas from their ponds, packed them into water-filled plastic bags, and loaded them onto dozens of motorboats. Curious onlookers gathered at the jetty. Speakers hailed the day as the start of a conservation programme. Next year they would release more arowanas, perhaps up to 500 fish.

With the speeches concluded, the crowd got into boats and headed towards two release sites at the more secluded northern half of the lake. They opened the bags and tipped the fish over the sides of the boats. Arowanas up to 60cm long dived into the copper-coloured waters. Every splash marked a spike in arowana numbers in the lake. Everyone was smiling.

Virtually absent since 2000, Asian arowanas swam again in Lake Bukit Merah.

The excitement masked the circuitous route Bey took to get there. Months ago, his peers argued that their efforts would be wasted because anglers and fishermen would catch the released arowanas. While the local fishermen community had agreed to protect the arowanas, breeders were not entirely convinced. Bey understood their concern and admitted that the breeders could not enforce protection. Still, he ploughed ahead.

A few years after the release, anglers were once again pulling arowanas out of Lake Bukit Merah, much to Bey’s delight. He clicks on a Facebook post from early January on his smartphone. It shows an angler, grinning and holding a large golden arowana he had just caught from the lake. Bey recognised it as a farm-bred arowana. The angler later returned the fish into the lake.

“Look, how fat and stout this arowana is,” says Bey. “It might have reproduced once or twice. So, wouldn’t you say our release was successful? I think it was.”

But few arowana breeders and traders share Bey’s optimism for arowana conservation. They choose their words carefully.

In Sungai Buloh, Selangor, arowana trader Sam Wong Wey Loon, 39, says that arowanas “are now everywhere [in farms and aquariums]. Why should they be protected? Better use the money to protect other animals.” Like the two other traders Macaranga spoke to, he does not think conservation matters to his arowana business. “No customer ever asked about conservation.”

Genetic pollution

There is one other arowana breeder in Bukit Merah who, like Bey, thinks that the industry should conserve wild arowanas. Henry Tan Shi Sung of PT Dragon Industry, 26, studied aquaculture and immunology in Taiwan. He returned in September 2023 to join the arowana business started by his grandfather.

Tan’s facility is similar to Bey’s. But while Bey trades in red, golden, and silver arowanas, Tan only has golden arowana. He speaks highly of their ‘blue-based golden arowana’, a variety thought to be restricted to Bukit Merah. His father started the farm with wild golden arowanas he caught in the 1990s from streams north of the lake.

“We took them from the lake, so we should give back to the environment,” says Tan. He also expects that after a few decades of captive-breeding, their farm stock will lose their physical appeal or vigour. He foresees a need to breed their captive fish with wild ones to reinvigorate their varieties and “hit the market again”.

Tan’s company is one of the largest in Bukit Merah with about 400 ponds. They pull nets over the ponds harbouring their most expensive fish, the albino golden arowanas, to keep them safe from otters.
Around Tan, the ponds are arranged in neat rows with coconut trees growing in between. Workers focus on separate parts of the operations. Some would clean the ponds, while others extract eggs from the males, incubate the fry, or raise them to 15cm long. Tan has a quarantine room in which he and his father nurse sick or genetically defective fish back to health. Every egg is precious, and they strive to raise each into a fish that could captivate a buyer.

Because they invest so much effort into every arowana, breeders dislike giving them away for conservation, even when prices hit bottom. Bey and his colleagues did not initiate another release. In 2022, the Department of Fisheries asked Bukit Merah breeders to contribute arowana for another release, this time in a smaller confined area closer to the fishermen jetty. Breeders reluctantly complied with 75 fish.

“Nobody would want to donate all the time,” says Tan. “It’s our investment, our capital. Crudely speaking, it’s like dumping money into the sea.”

Tan’s colleagues echo his sentiment. They are paying the government for CITES permits and quarantine services, so why does the government not pay them to release arowanas? Perhaps RM500 per fish, one breeder suggested.

Macaranga posed the breeders’ request for government compensation to the Department of Fisheries. The Department said that industry’s contribution to conservation is a key part of the CITES framework and an explicit condition in the separate application to access the US market.

Furthermore, Director-General Adnan bin Hussain emphasised that the only revenue the Department collects from arowana breeders is the RM50 charge per CITES permit needed to export arowanas. The Department issued 6,445 of such permits between 2018 and 2022; the revenue is channeled into the federal government’s Consolidated Fund.

With CITES permit fees so low, funding for conservation efforts currently must be found elsewhere. Industries that profited from wildlife trade should step up, says Susan Lieberman, vice president of international policy at the Wildlife Conservation Society. She argues that legislation would be necessary to compel industries to pay.

Besides money matters, breeders are also irritated that they are asked to release more arowanas when they cannot tell if those they had released are dead or alive.

“How can [the government] prove that the arowanas in the lake are increasing? What data can you show me? How are you monitoring the fish?” says Tan. “What’s the protection for the arowana?”
“Those are my questions for the government.”

Chapter 7: Is home safe?

Tan’s question is valid. Who has been monitoring the numbers and health of the released arowanas in Lake Bukit Merah?

So far, nobody.

One might think that it is too laborious to track the fate of 300 arowanas in a vast lake. But ecologists have a simple get-around to estimate population sizes. It is called the mark-recapture method.

The idea is simple: You catch some fish, mark them in a harmless way, release them, and then catch fish again. The more marked fish you recapture in the second round, the smaller the actual fish population. It’s akin to bumping into your friend after you part ways in a mall: the more crowded the mall, the less likely you are to spot her again.

The mark-recapture method would have worked well for monitoring arowanas in Bukit Merah. That is because they were already marked. Before they released the arowanas, breeders had inserted a mini tag into each. When a special antenna is passed over the fish, it reads the tag’s unique serial number and identifies the fish.

When asked, the Department of Fisheries said that they will conduct mark-recapture study on arowanas in Lake Bukit Merah in the future.

“If no monitoring is done, then there’s no point to releasing the fish”, says fisheries researcher Amy Then of Universiti Malaya.

Surveys of arowana populations will reveal if the released fish are reproducing. That is crucial for future conservation status assessments. The IUCN Red List, which assessed the Asian arowana as endangered in 2019, would not include released individuals in any future assessment of the species’ conservation status “until they have successfully reproduced in the wild,” says Craig Hilton-Taylor, Head of the Red List Unit at IUCN.

Furthermore, monitoring can flag current and future threats to the arowanas. They live in dangerous waters. For one, locals claim that “outsiders” have fished and killed arowanas, though perhaps unintentionally. Mohd Fadzil bin Din, 45, the de facto leader of the Bukit Merah fishermen community, says that the Perak government has not gazetted protection for Asian arowana in its state fisheries regulation. “When people take [arowanas], there’s no enforcement from Fisheries. They don’t have the power yet. Neither do we fishermen. Nobody has.”

Look upstream

Habitat loss poses another severe but insidious threat to arowanas and the entire lake ecology. Forest loss by the lake and its upstream Sungai Kurau began in the early 1990s, according to 64-year-old local fisherman Johar bin Bakar. Satellite imagery suggests that most forests were cleared by 2001

The sparse canopy of oil palm plantations is a poor shield for the soil. When it rains, which it often does in Bukit Merah, torrents of soil wash into the lake and river, says Johar. Erosion turns the rivers and lake murky and blankets their depths in dirt. These conditions disrupt the ecology of small fishes which arowanas prey upon.

The health of a lake depends on its upstream rivers and forests, says aquatic ecologist Fatimah binti Yusoff of Universiti Putra Malaysia. That is particularly true of Lake Bukit Merah. It was created from damming two rivers. Lake and river fishes eat aquatic insects which in turn graze on plankton and the detritus that comes from the forest. Fatimah says that rivers need riparian forests at least 50 m wide to sustain their ecology. Without these, rivers run short of food and energy.

Yet, most of the bank along a 12km stretch of Sungai Kurau upstream of the lake looks barren. This contradicts the guidelines from the Department of Irrigation and Drainage of at least 20 m of forested riverside.

Furthermore, Macaranga located 5 sand-mining sites on Sungai Kurau.

The Department of Fisheries acknowledges the threats of forest loss and sand mining around Lake Bukit Merah. “We have little choice but to conserve arowanas there as it is their original habitat,” says Director-General Adnan bin Hussain. “We have raised these issues with the Perak state government. We hope they realise the importance of the environment.”

The Department of Irrigation and Drainage and the Perak Chief Minister’s Office have not responded to Macaranga’s questions.

Chapter 8: Hope

“Arowana is a sad story,” says Fatimah. She laments not just exploitation of the fish but also that of the rivers and lakes in the country. A 2010 review of freshwater fish in Malaysia found that 30% of the 470 species were more than moderately threatened. In Selangor and Perak, habitat loss, pollution, and overfishing have displaced 40—60% of fish species.

But there is hope. We have the time and words to write a happy ending for the Asian arowana story.
One key step is to protect Asian arowanas with the strongest possible laws in the country. Fishermen and scientists have questioned the government’s dedication to conservation when laws are yet inadequate.

The Department of Fisheries acknowledge this shortfall and are seeking to amend the Perak fisheries regulations (Kaedah-kaedah Perikanan Sungai Perak 1992). They want to list the Asian arowana as a protected species and to gazette the sanctuary. They submitted their proposal to the Perak State Law Office in October 2023.

It is also encouraging that wild Asian arowanas are still found outside of Bukit Merah in Malaysia. Scientists from Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM) have recently detected fragments of the fish’s DNA in lakes in Kedah. More surveys are expected as a team led by researcher Haslawati binti Baharuddin at the Department of Fisheries has just developed their own arowana DNA toolkit.

Anecdotes and social media postings also show green arowanas in Pahang and Johor. While green arowanas do not sell for much, they are threatened too.

As such, arowana conservation efforts must extend beyond Lake Bukit Merah too. Kedah is a priority as ichthyologist Sébastien Lavoué of USM thinks that with quick action, there is a “slim chance” of saving the wild arowanas in certain lakes.

But Bey the breeder argues that the best chance of conserving arowanas lies in Bukit Merah, the original home of Malaysia’s golden arowana. So, what is needed to make wild arowanas common in Bukit Merah, as they were a century ago?

More releases of farm arowanas would help in the short-run. But in the long-term, can we give the fish the environment it needs to thrive? One free from the upheavals of sandmining and soil erosion? One with lush forests on the bank that will house insects and small fish to feed the arowanas? Lake Bukit Merah once supported hundreds of fishermen; its waters still feed thousands of hectares of paddy fields. It has lots of untapped tourism potential. The Perak state government has much to gain and little to lose by conserving the ecology of the lake and its rivers, and thereby the arowanas within.

Conservation runs on motivation. Can we check and share arowana numbers? Breeders and fishermen would be happy to know the fruits of their labour.

In December, angler Mohamad Zuhril Hakim bin Zaili caught an arowana at the lake. At less than 30cm long, it was too small to be one of the released arowana. This must be one of their offspring born in the lake, Hakim thought. He remembered that profits from selling arowana paid for his wedding, and from that he was blessed with 3 children. Might there be a future where his children could enjoy the thrill of fishing wild arowanas?

Hakim released the young arowana on the spot. It swam into the shelter of the submerged plant roots.